Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby programming language, is joining the Platform-as-a-Service company Heroku as Chief Architect of Ruby.

I-Programmer doesn't usually cover news about people and business - i.e. corporate new - but this one has implications for Ruby, the programming language created and curated by Matz.

According to Heroku's announcement:

“As a member of our platform development team, Matsumoto-san will continue his work on the Ruby language in close collaboration with the Ruby community, keeping the language open and advancing the technology in exciting new ways. Matz will further accelerate innovation for Ruby and make it even friendlier for developers to build world-class apps.”

Heroku, which was acquired by Saleforce.com in December 2010 has Ruby as its primary language, although only last week it added support for Clojure and also supports Node.js.

Explaining his motivation, Matsumoto, who will continue his work as research fellow of open source systems integrator Network Applied Communication Laboratory in Japan and also retain his position as fellow at the Rakuten Institute of Technology, said:

"I decided to join Heroku because they are committed to openness and developing Ruby further," said Matsumoto. "I want to make the Ruby development experience even richer, more natural and more productive than ever for all Ruby developers."